Weight-loss surgery without the knife? A new hypnosis protocol has helped people lose literally hundreds of pounds.

Ask Amber, a 30-year-old communications specialist from Olympia, Washington, about the gastric-band surgery she had last July, and she'll describe it in detail: the sound of her gurney being wheeled into the operating room, the acrid smell of anesthetic, the tight feeling in her stomach that she awoke with afterward. The procedure's success became evident as she dropped 82 pounds over the next six months: "I lost 10 inches from my waist and went from a 42DD to a 36C bra size," she says. "It was a crazy transformation." Even crazier? The surgery never really happened.

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Amber underwent Gastric Mind Band (trademarked as GmB), a sort of virtual-reality hypnosis session—complete with hospital-mimicking sound effects, odors, and temperature control—during which patients "experience" the implanting of a stomach-shrinking apparatus. According to British hypnotherapist Martin Shirran, who codeveloped the method with his wife, Marion, also a hypnotherapist, some patients "really do believe they've had gastric band surgery," but most know they haven't. All of the successful cases, however, walk away feeling as though their stomachs are smaller and can't hold much food, just like those who've had the real operation. At the Shirrans' Elite Clinics in Fuengirola, Spain (hypnotists trained by the Shirrans also offer GmB in London, Seattle, and Philadelphia), more than 600 patients have been treated since 2008, and there is currently a three-month waiting list—despite the $1,950 price tag.

As credibility-testing feats of mind over matter go, imaginary weight-loss surgery ranks pretty high. And to be clear, there have been no clinical studies of GmB: All positive reports are purely anecdotal. To Mitchell Roslin, MD, FACS, chief of obesity surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, the implied comparison to the actual gastric banding procedure is "disingenuous" at best. "The idea of comparing hypnosis to a medical device that's been through two FDA trials is basically marketing voodoo," he says. "There is no objective data. You have people who are paying money, wanting something to work. And we know that people can lose weight when they're motivated: Just watch The Biggest Loser. What you're seeing is the short-term effect, the placebo effect—not medically verified, long-term results."

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Still, as a possible alternative—however wacky—to the ordeal of weight-loss surgery, it's easy to see GmB's allure. Gastric banding, which costs an average of $20,000 and carries a 40 percent chance of complications and a one in 1,000 risk of death, is the least invasive type of bariatric surgery (the other most common practices are gastric bypass, which eliminates part of the small intestine from the digestion equation, and sleeve gastrectomy, which involves "stapling" the stomach into a narrow tube). Although more than 20 million Americans have a BMI higher than 35 and are potentially eligible for bariatric surgery, only about 200,000 get the procedure every year, so the medical community has been casting about for plausible alternatives. Proposed options have included pacemakers that deliver jolts of electricity to the stomach wall to diminish appetite and balloons that can be inflated in the belly to create a sense of fullness, but neither has yet merited FDA approval.

There is some evidence that the brain's powers of visualization can affect the motivation to eat. In a recent study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University, researchers found that people who imagined eating 30 M&Ms consumed less of the actual candy when it was offered to them afterward than those who visualized feeding 30 quarters into a laundry machine. "There's a lot of research to show that imagination and experience overlap," says Joachim Vosgerau, PhD, who was on the study team. "Whether I think about seeing a spider or really do see a spider, the same reaction will occur in my brain. The way the brain imagines things is by stimulating the regions that would be involved in experiencing something." Then there's the well-documented placebo effect, which is believed to explain why up to 75 percent of subjects derive some benefit from taking dummy pills in FDA trials of new drugs. Though its parameters haven't been studied across all areas of medicine, the effect might apply to some minor surgeries: In a clinical trial conducted by Houston-based orthopedic surgeon Bruce Moseley, MD, and published in The New England Journal of Medicine, patients with arthritic knees who were taken into an operating room and given incisions but no surgical intervention showed as much improvement in mobility and pain relief as those who underwent arthroscopic surgery.

The placebo effect has also been shown to work on subjects who know the "medicine" they're being given isn't real; similarly, hypnotism relies on a tacit compliance from patients—if they choose to believe it works, it's more likely to. Despite vaguely vaudevillian specters of pocket-watch-swinging quacks intoning "You are getting very skinny...," studies show that hypnotherapy can legitimately assist weight loss. A study published in Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1986 showed that among a group of 60 obese women following the same diet plan, those using hypnosis shed an average of 17 pounds, while the others lost an average of only 0.5 pounds, and a 1996 meta-analysis published in the same journal demonstrated that adding hypnosis to a range of weight-loss treatments increased their effectiveness by an average of 97 percent. During hypnosis, suggestions—such as reinforcing the idea that the subject doesn't need to clear her plate—are "planted" into the brain when it's most relaxed and receptive. It's logical to target the subconscious when trying to quell the urge to pig out: As Susan Roberts, PhD, a Tufts University nutritionist and coauthor of The Instinct Diet, says, "The feelings of reward for eating and hunger are in the lower, unconscious part of our brains."

Even Shirran, however, doesn't believe that hypnosis alone is enough to conjure a sustained slim-down. The "surgery" in GmB is actually the culmination of a four-day intensive program during which patients are given "forensic questionnaires" to parse their relationship to food, shown videos of gastric-band surgery being performed, and taken through guided-imagery sessions in which they envision their stomachs deflating from the size of a melon to that of a golf ball. Hypnotist Hazel New­som, who practices GmB at her office near Seat­tle (and who recently appeared on Good Morning America with a patient who had lost 125 pounds, purportedly from GmB), says, "One of the components is cognitive-behavioral therapy. We're teaching people to think about the way they think." Even the vocabulary of dieting is reconfigured to be more positive: You don't lose weight, you "release" it, as if those extra 15 or 50 pounds were just hanging around, waiting for permission to leave. By the time GmB subjects "go under" for the faux operation, they've already begun to unknot the tangle of physical and psychological impulses that led to their weight problem in the first place.

"I've read about a lot of people who've had gastric-band surgery," says Amber, the GmB believer, "and it's been a failure because they weren't able to change the behaviors behind their eating patterns. What's worked for me is the package deal: The physical sensation of my stomach being smaller only lasted a few weeks, but I had the education about calories and portion control to fall back on."

Surgeon Roslin cautions, "I wouldn't see several thousand patients a year if losing weight were as simple as behavioral therapy, hypnosis, and counseling." Ervin Denham, MD, FACS, a bariatric surgeon at Northshore University HealthSystem in suburban Chicago, says there's no reason for someone not to try GmB, should they be so inclined. "We want candidates for bariatric surgery to have tried to lose weight by other means first. Even if only 5 percent of people lose weight and keep it off from doing this, that's still 5 percent who won't need surgery."